A six star hotel for Adelaide

The plan is to build it on government-owned land west of the Morphett Street bridge in Adelaide. It is 10,000 square metres of State Government and Adelaide City Council land.

It will be given to a private developer for a “peppercorn price”.

The new luxury hotel will provide “much needed high-end accommodation”, the minister said in a statement.

“The location is a unique opportunity for a statement international development within the Riverbank Precinct to address a shortfall, highlighted by the Ashes Test, in our high-end tourism and business offering,” Hamilton-Smith said.

The development has been spruiked in a series of Investment Attraction South Australia documents and, according to Hamilton-Smith, the Riverbank hotel development had attracted “significant interest” from investors,

“They need to see the land, they need to see the location, they need to see what our contribution will be and they need to see us as a partner to help them with planning,” Mr Hamilton-Smith told the Adelaide Advertiser.

“The rest would be up to them.”

And, he said, it would be a good deal.

“In this case, we own the land, it’s a very significant saving and that would enable the developer to put the extra money into the building,” he told the newspaper.

At this stage, the proposal still needs Cabinet approval. And the council is eyeing the site for a commercial helipad so the minister is hoping to persuade them to pursue a hotel housing commercial offices, penthouse suites and an indigenous art gallery in its basement.

He said the hotel would have a signature, Outback-themed design conceived through a national design competition and would ease Adelaide’s shortage of hotels which was quite apparent what was on offer during the recent Ashes test.

Estimating it would cost between $200 million to $300 million would trigger a series of job-creating “indigenous offerings”.